


Distance Kills

by Euregatto



Series: RVB one-shots [5]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Drinking, F/F, F/M, Featuring South as the worst sister ever and York as the worst best friend ever, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mild Language, Mild Sexual Content, One-Sided Relationship, Post-Project Freelancer, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 10:50:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5045476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>York is tired of pretending. South has problems letting go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distance Kills

**Author's Note:**

> Just kind of wanted to experiment with an idea. Based on the song "Distance Kills" by Mt. Eden & Nolita Knights

 

 

“I slept with your brother, once.”

His voice is as gentle as a shot gun in the dark. Brackets of moonlight spill over the threadbare sheets, teasing cold into the room like cigarette smoke through the open window, and the train across the street rockets along its runway with its floodlights on high to pierce the shadows through the panes. Her luminescent gaze watches as the distorted shadows traverse the walls to escape the glare. In mere seconds it passes and the audible racketing of metal fades into the night, and it isn’t until the silence has settled once more does South suddenly remember it’s safe to breathe.

Maybe she anticipates the shadows to be Texas or the Meta or worse, even if this couldn’t get any worse but it never hurts to be prepared. She doesn’t quite expect York’s comment, not that she expects much from him anyway; he makes conversation for the sake of conversation and she thinks it’s starting to get under her skin.

“I know,” she says tonelessly, turning her head to look at him. She’s always known, like some sort of weird telepathy between twins. And even regardless of their bond by birth she could see it, North’s obtusely obvious personality, getting too close during missions or conversations, using hands more than necessary.

He doesn’t seemed fazed by her passive response and drones on listlessly, his lips too close to her face as if telling her a secret the shadows shouldn’t know. Reeks of cigarette smoke and cheap shampoo and bitter, dark beer. “I figured. He left without a note and we never spoke of it again.”

He has a way of avoiding eye contact when he speaks to her. She would hate it but she can’t tell herself that she’s disappointed; she’s grateful, really, that he keeps himself in line and that they never make much out of whatever this is. Doesn’t stop him from fucking her senseless into the mattress, uttering someone else’s name when he loses his grasp on reality. Doesn’t stop her from riding him until her hips are sore and she’s barely able to swallow everything she needs to forget right now.

Needs to forget that she’s screwing her brother’s crush while pretending he’s someone else entirely. It’s all fucked, really.

His half-lidded eyes are gazing intently at her jawline. Thinking about something incomprehensible to her, maybe wondering what it would be like if she was the agent in aqua armor, and it only figures that once again, she isn’t good enough for anyone except for _Wash_ of all people. (And that was really a two time fling, only because she was stressed after the oil platform mission going to shit and he was stressed from whatever mission he was on CT managed to screw up and hell, she always seemed to be fucking them over from the beginning – but in the end she found that Wash could have been special. Different. Something more, maybe.)

The conversation is over before it ever has a chance to begin. Wide awake and terrified of breathing in case the shadows might suddenly realize she’s alive.

She returns her attention to the window. The vastness of the sky doming the city and the eerie sense of doom with its voided existence, like teetering on the edge of a dropping rollercoaster when you suddenly realize this could end tragically. “He had a thing for you,” she murmurs for the sake of filling the silence, feels his arm press into her stomach. He’s always been like that, coveting affection and attention from all the wrong people. “But you’ve always had your dick pointing in that other bitch’s direction.”

“Don’t call her that,” he stresses, knows that she’s still biting but none of that even matters anymore. It shouldn’t and his fingers trace along the scars in her torso, up to the valley of her breasts. “Maybe he wanted to forget. I pretended I didn’t remember either, after all…we were _seriously_ drunk off our asses.”

This scenario would bother North but he isn’t here, in this cheap apartment in this sprawling metropolis city, where they might be safe. Might. He’s out with Theta and South suspects she won’t see him until the morning and she never asks where he goes only that he sometimes returns with blood on his hands and U.N.S.C military firearms to sell for rent money. South figures it’s going to be her brother’s unconditional loyalty that will be his ultimate downfall in the long run and perhaps that was always the quality that has ever set them apart.

“You broke his heart,” she utters under her breath, gasping gently when his fingertips pinch one of her perked nipples.

“I didn’t mean to.”

He shifts closer, kisses her neck, brings his hand up to her pulse. Casual and curious. Seeking to fill a need they both desire for vastly different reasons in acutely similar ways. He thinks this might break North’s heart too but he can’t help himself. She’s the same frigid and lovely experience of standing on slick ice. A misstep waiting to happen.

“But you knew, didn’t you?”

His exhale trembles. “I didn’t _mean_ to.”

“You don’t mean a lot, do you?”

He counts the beat between her hard little pulses, pushing up under the prison of her alabaster skin. “You’re alive,” he whispers, as if falling backwards off a cliff. Breathless and voiceless and for a several agonizing seconds, without a heartbeat.

“I am.”

“ _She’s_ not. And I meant to tell her how I felt.” He presses his head into her chest, hears her fluttering heartbeat and her murmuring breath. “I _meant_ to, you know?”

South reaches over to the floor and finds a half cigarette hanging in the dip of the ash tray, lights it with York’s lighter left discarded near worn clothes. Takes a drag, returns the stick to the ceramic dish. “Do you regret it?” she asks, blowing smoke through her nose.

York feels Delta humming in the back of his mind, as if probing into his memories with a piqued intrigue. He theorizes that Delta can synchronize with South through her lashing words and the bruises she leaves on his skin, the flesh that carves up from his back to furl under her nails. The AI shouldn’t feel these things, even in his dormant state; it’s dangerous and plausibly horrifying how the metaphysical theorem originated from such a simple, biblical concept of creation and humanity and mortality.

They don’t understand regret and pain and morose. They’re trying so desperately to be human they can’t grasp the concept of what will happen when they finally _do_. That to be human you have to sacrifice everything that keeps you together by hairline stitches, suffer and rot and scream in agonizing silence. Wake up one morning to death himself, sleep to a rebirthing moon.

Wonder constantly if you regret a lot more than you think.

“I don’t know,” he replies despondently, returning his lips to her neck, to this cold night, this cruel humanity. Sucks at the patches of red already woven into her pallid skin from before. “Do _you_ regret anything?”

South hesitates under his wandering touch. Imagines for a moment that she’s back on the Mother of Invention, that it’s _Wash_ grasping her breasts with kisses on her face—(but that memory is bitter, tastes like poison on her tongue)—and it’s _Wash_ mounting her with his lips on her chest—(but that memory is fractured, splintered by mistakes)—but the dream ebbs into this brittle reality when somewhere in the distance a car alarm blares. York is the one moving over her now, imagining that she’s a woman with red hair and mossy eyes arching with pleasure, not the goddamned twin sister of his best friend (although he seems to have a thing for blondes, she’ll give him that).

And it’s been like this for these last few weeks. A mutual understanding that there’s something they desire they won’t find in each other but it can be enough when the burn rises.

Perhaps it’s wrong that he seeks comfort in her, in pretending that she’s someone else, and perhaps it’s even worse she uses him to cope with the loss of what she’s never quite managed to grasp (at some point she thinks she might have gotten too close to a traitor in brown armor after one night of heated sex, but she was gone before South could reflect long enough to regret it anyway).

“It doesn’t matter what I regret,” she says finally. “Everything was just one big, fucking _lie_ anyway. Almost feels like we spent more time trying to put out a fire with gasoline instead of water.”

He slides two fingers between her legs and presses against something sensitive and she moans with torrid ecstasy. Their bodies fit like syzygies under the temperance of hot iron. Her nails dig into scars on his shoulders, his weight anchors her to the mattress, not even able to afford a bed frame between any of them. He works only enough to get her going before he situates himself between her thighs, hips grinding gently against hers, never as hard as she would like.

“I’m tired of pretending,” he admits. “I’m tired of telling myself that you’re her and I’m tired of you moaning different names when you come.” He slides into her easily, pushing up into her velvet warmth, coaxing her legs open with relative ease and she doesn’t care if the neighbors can hear her groan. “It’s almost degrading to hear you call me Wash.”

“That’s how it’s been,” she says, gasping when he brushes against a sensitive bundle of nerves. “That’s how _we’ve_ been.”

“Because we wanted to hold on. I think I just want to let go.”

South doesn’t let go of anything. The misery and despair and vague sense of impending rage is ever present, scarcely happy, rarely smiling, an expression pressed into constant worry or frustration even when placidly active. York isn’t sure if he likes that. York isn’t sure she likes him either but he wants to _forget_.

“You can say no, if you’re not ready.”

“Why the fuck not,” she tells him firmly, “it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Of course it matters.”

“It doesn’t,” she reiterates. “I don’t think we’ll ever get that lie back – and whatever you’re trying to run from, York, it’s already stopped haunting you.”

She brings her hands up to gently cup his face, so unlike her it unnerves him, running a thumb over the jagged scar branching into his blind eye like a lightning bolt.

“Last time I checked, Carolina’s just a corpse at the base of a cliff.”

  

  

 

She’s gone the next morning. North’s gone too, when York takes the time to look, missing armor and clothes and money and some rations from the pantry.

She doesn’t even leave a fucking note.

 

 


End file.
